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Audibility of Spectral Switching in Head-Related Transfer Functions

Binaural synthesis of a time-varying sound field is performed by updating head-related transfer functions (HRTFs). The updating is done to reflect the changes in the sound transmission to the listener’s ears that occur as a result of moving sound. Unless the differences in HRTFs are sufficiently small, a direct switching between them will cause an audible artifact that is heard as a click. By modeling HRTFs as minimum-phase filters and pure delays, it is possible to study the effects of spectral and time switching separately. Time switching was studied in a previous investigation. This work presents preliminary results on minimum audible spectral switching (MASS).